It's been all go here at Hydro, setting up our new workshop (and our house!) here in Wellington, lots of design work on new products and improving existing products, churning out some orders, and trying to make sure the dog gets enough exercise when it's pretty cold outside. To say nothing of hilarious new words and games from our wee toddler.

We have a bunch of sticks heading over to the USA and our mate Dave from Canam, so if you are hitting any US competitions soon look for Dave and the Canam shop to see our newest stuff. He will have a few advance examples of our new skeleton gloves which are nearing the end of their development and nearly ready to go on the site, just adding a few touches. The skellys are designed for performance, comfort and mobility, we're just trying to add as much durability as we can in high-wear areas (thumb and fingertips etc) before we launch. Here are a few advance pics.

There are some Skelly prototypes around as advance versions for people really keen to get their hands on them early, email in if this is you and we can do the same for you. One of these we sent last week to Western Australia for Mitch from the Aussie U23 team, and I also sent a special request of a glove for Arny, the legendary Aussie forward and recent Aussie mens coach. Here's a pic of the 2 gloves, one for Mitch, our standard Skelly prototype in a lovely Aussie green and gold, and a special request from Arny, a glove "that you can scrunch up in the palm of your hand". I'm not sure if I put too much padding on it... we will see how he finds it. It's incredibly thin, basically protecting against abrasion only. I saw Arny playing with a super thin glove like this in 2009 for the Barbarians at the Trans-tasmans in Melbourne... yes he played elite mens grade with some of the heaviest hitters in the game in the water (Andre Zylstra, Herve Thaurus, Rob Tinkler)... the motto, float like a butterfly sting like a bee.

New Jolt Sticks! Dave at Canam will have a bunch of our new Jolt sticks, and I have just posted them up on our website for sale. These are based on Jolyon Van Daalen's sticks, he's old-school through and through and loves his wooden sticks but I've given him an alternative in case he ever finds himself out of black and white paint. Basically they give an amazing right-side flick and chase, for fading around backs on the right wing, Jolyon's speciality. It's the angle of the handle, further forward than our standard straightish handle angle for most NZ sticks, that allows the quicker pass to the right. Nice hook on this stick too, and for people possibly with the occasional thumb injury the handle of this stick is great for that, really strong hammer-handle grip as opposed to the more adjustable knife-handle style of our Katanas. Doing our best to provide for all the different tastes out there! Here are some pics... These are in the product section of the site now and available to order.

NZ Tournaments... We have been to Nth Island Champs, Central Schools qualifying here and Northern schools qualifying has just been as well... very compressed calendar this year here in NZ as we try to fit everything in before the rep agegroup teams head over to Spain for the agegroup world champs in August, super excited for those guys! Should be fun.